Priscilla Lane was
considered for the role of Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (1939).

A
strikingly beautiful actress, Priscilla Lane (born Priscilla
Mullican, June 12, 1915  April 4, 1995) was the youngest of
five sisters. Siblings Leota had established herself in a successful
stage career in New York while Rosemary Lane and Lola Lane were also
highly regarded performers who graced Hollywood from the late 1920s
to the mid-1940s, but it was Priscilla who achieved the most success
on the silver screen. A fifth sister, Martha, never entered show business.

Priscilla is best
remembered for her roles in as series of light romantic comedys
during the 1030's, paired with other Warner contract players such as
Wayne Morris, Jeffrey Lynn and Ronald Reagan. But her popularity rose
above the material and she would score a major hit with Four
Daughters in 1938 (today they would call it a franchise) that would
spawn two official sequels and a sort-of sequel. She worked with some
of the biggest stars of the day including John Garfield (with whom
she would make three films) and has a number of "classic"
films on her resume. The Roaring Twenties (1939) co-starring with
James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart; Saboteur (1942), an Alfred
Hitchcock film in which she plays the heroine; and Arsenic and Old
Lace (1944), in which she portrays Cary Grant's fiancée and bride.

Priscilla Mullican was
born, in Indianola, Iowa, a small college town south of Des Moines.
She was the youngest of five daughters of Dr. Lorenzo Mullican, DDS,
and his wife, Cora Bell Hicks. Dr. Mullican had a dental practice in
Indianola. The family owned a large house with 22 rooms, some of
which they rented out to students attending nearby Simpson College.

Priscilla and one of her
sisters, Rosemary, traveled to Des Moines every weekend to study
dancing and made their first professional appearance on September
30th, 1930, at the Des Moines' Paramount Theater. Priscilla, then 15,
performed on stage as part of the entertainment accompanying the
release of her sister Lola's Hollywood movie Good News (1930).

Priscilla
and her sisters were encouraged to sing and perform by their mother
Cora and after graduating from high school, Priscilla was permitted
to travel to New York to visit a third sister, Leota, who was then
appearing in a musical revue in Manhattan. Priscilla enrolled at the
nearby Fagen School of Dramatics, and Leota paid the fee. At this
time, talent agent Al Altman saw Priscilla performing in one of
Fagen's school plays and invited her to screentest for MGM. She was
16 years old. Priscilla wrote to a friend in Indianola, "Leota
accompanied me to a sort of theater in a New York skyscraper. Others
were there being made up. One was a strange looking girl with her
hair slicked back in a sort of a bun. Her name is said to be
Catherine Hepburn [sic]. Not very pretty, I thought, but Mr. Altman
said she has something. Margaret Sullavan, the Broadway actress, was
there too!" A follow-up letter said that her test had proven
unsuitable. The tests of Hepburn and Sullavan did not go very well
either, both were rejected by MGM at the time.

In 1932, Priscilla's
mother, Cora and sister, Rosemary arrived in New York. Cora
immediately went to work pushing her two young daughters into
attending auditions for various prospective Broadway productions,
without success. During a tryout at a music publishing office,
orchestra leader and radio personality Fred Waring heard them
harmonizing. He found them attractive and talented and soon signed
them to a radio contract and soon became featured vocalists with
Waring's orchestra, with sister Lola briefly joining them. Priscilla,
who at this time adopted the surname Lane, quickly became known as
the comedienne of the group. Rosemary sang the ballads, while
Priscilla performed the swing numbers and wisecracked with Waring and
various guests. Back in Iowa, Dr. Mullican instituted divorce
proceedings against his wife on the grounds of desertion, and the
divorce was granted in 1933.

Rosemary and Priscilla
remained with Fred Waring for almost five years. In 1937 Waring was
engaged by Warner Bros. in Hollywood to appear with his entire band
in Varsity Show, a musical starring Dick Powell. Both Rosemary and
Priscilla were tested and awarded feature roles in the film. Rosemary
shared the romantic passages with Powell, while Priscilla was a high
spirited college girl.

Fan
mail began to pour into the studio inquiring about the three Lane
sisters. It was revealed that Priscilla was fresh, wholesome,
sincere, and straightforward. She was blonde and blue-eyed, weighed
102 pounds, stood 5 feet 2 ½ inches and sported an 18 inch
waist. She was athletic, swam every day, was an excellent tennis
player, and rode horseback. She was, however, very feminine and loved
perfumes and flowers. She was passionate about cats and owned twelve.
Her musical tastes tended to be serious, as she preferred classical
music. She read mystery stories for relaxation. She was superstitious
and would not wear her favorite color blue on Mondays, considered
Wednesday her best day, and seven her lucky number. In later years
she said she had worn an old pair of brown shoes for luck in at least
one scene in every film she made. Priscilla shared a rented ranch
home in the San Fernando Valley with her mother and Rosemary.

Warners purchased
Priscilla and Rosemarys contract from Fred Waring and signed
them to seven year pacts. Priscillas first film after Varsity
Show was Men are Such Fools, in which she was starred opposite Wayne
Morris and Humphrey Bogart (right). This was followed by Love Honor
and Behave, another light romantic comedy again with Morris and
Cowboy From Brooklyn again teaming with Dick Powell. Priscilla was
next assigned the lead in Brother Rat, which had been a very
successful Broadway play. Again she played opposite Wayne Morris, and
among the cast were such newcomers as Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, Jane
Bryan, and Eddie Albert.

Brother Rat is a 1938 film
about cadets at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia
and was directed by William Keighley. The title refers to the term
used for cadets in their first year at the Institute. Scenes of the
film were shot on site in Lexington on the Institute's historic
Parade Ground, and the baseball game scene was filmed at Alumni
Memorial Field. The film is notable for featuring future US President
Ronald Reagan, who, while working on the film, met the actress Jane
Wyman (both pictured below far right) whom he later married. The cast
returned for a sequel in 1940, Brother Rat and a Baby (below).

Warner
Bros. had purchased a story by Fannie Hurst titled Sister Act and
planned to star Errol Flynn in the film, along with four actresses.
Flynn, however, was withdrawn from the project to star in The
Adventures of Robin Hood. The script for Sister Act was then
rewritten to place the emphasis on the four girls. Bette Davis was to
be the star, but she refused the role. Lola Lane, always
enterprising, approached Jack Warner with the suggestion she and her
sisters star in the film. Warner agreed, and Leota was summoned from
New York to test for the part of Emma, but proved unsuitable. The
studio substituted Gale Page, a young contractee as the fourth
daughter along with Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, and Lola Lane.
Page would be tagged for the rest of her career as the fourth Lane sister.

When the film, now titled
Four Daughters (below), was released on September 24th, 1938, it
proved to be a big hit. It is a musical drama film that tells the
story of a happy musical family whose lives and loves are disrupted
by the arrival of a cynical young composer (John Garfield) who
interjects himself into the daughters' romantic lives. The movie
stars Claude Rains as the father of the girls, May Robson as Aunt
Etta and Jeffrey Lynn, Dick Foran and Frank McHugh as wouldbe suitors
of the Lemp daughters.

The film was written by
Lenore J. Coffee and Julius J. Epstein, and was directed by Michael
Curtiz. The film was an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture, Best
Director, Best Supporting Actor (John Garfield), Best Adapted
Screenplay and Sound Recording (Nathan Levinson). For Best Picture
and Best Director it lost to Frank Capra's You Can't Take It with
You. Four Daughters' success led to two sequels with more or less the
same cast: Four Wives (1939) and Four Mothers (1941).

So popular were cast of
Four Daughters thay all appeared together in the film Daughters
Courageous. A 1939 drama film starring the three Lane Sisters (Lola,
Rosemary and Priscilla), with the fourth sister being played by Gale
Page. The movie also stars John Garfield and Claude Rains. Based on
the play Fly Away Home by Dorothy Bennett and Irving White, the film
was directed by Michael Curtiz, but is unrelated to the other three
films in the Lane Sisters' series and is about a different family.
Although the story was different, it also covered the lives and loves
of four sisters, and proved to be another hit with the public and is
concidered by fans to be a sort-of sequel.

Priscilla's
next assignment was Yes, My Darling Daughter, adapted from a
successful play. The story concerned a girl, the daughter of a
feminist and one time suffragette, who decides to spend a weekend
alone with her fiancee, played by Jeffrey Lynn. The premise of the
film in which an unmarried couple spent a weekend together
unchaperoned was roundly criticized and was banned in some parts of
the United States. The publicity, however, piqued public curiousity,
and the film became a box office hit. Priscilla received praise for
her vivacious performance, as did Lynn playing the boy friend.

Priscilla was again cast
with John Garfield in Dust Be My Destiny, a melodrama of prison life.
She played the sympathetic stepdaughter of a brutal prison foreman,
played by Stanley Ridges. She falls in love with convict Garfield.
The original ending of the film had the young lovers dying as
fugitives from justice. Audience reaction at previews was so negative
that the studio withdrew the film and reshot a happy ending. Rosemary
Lane was also teamed with Garfield in Blackwell's Island (1939),
however this was not a success.

Priscilla attained full
co-starring status in her next film, The Roaring Twenties and was
billed above the title along with James Cagney. A major box office
hit, Priscilla was shown to advantage as a night club singer, who
marries lawyer Jeffrey Lynn, but is lusted after by gangster Cagney.
She sang "It Had to Be You," "Melancholy Baby,"
and "Im Just Wild About Harry".

The
Roaring Twenties is a 1939 crime thriller starring James Cagney,
Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart and Gladys George. The epic movie,
spanning the periods between 1919 and 1933, was directed by Raoul
Walsh, and written by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and Robert Rossen
based based on "The World Moves On," a short story by Mark
Hellinger, a columnist who had been hired by Jack Warner to write
screenplays. The movie is hailed as a classic in the gangster movie
genre, and considered an homage to the classic gangster movie of the
early 1930s and the end of the Warner Bros. gangster era. Bogart
would go on to superstardom with Casablanca and the Maltese Falcon
and Cagney would have great success with Yankee Doodle Dandy. Though
they were leaving these gangster roles behind, both actors would
revisit their ganster roots, Cagney in White Heat (1949) and Bogart
in The Desperate Hours (1955). The Roaring Twenties was the third and
last film that Cagney and Bogart made together.

At this point, Priscilla
was earning $750 a week, a fantastic salary for the Depression era,
but puny compared to the salaries of other studio stars. She demanded
an increase. She also felt the plot of her next movie, Money and the
Woman was sordid and refused to report for work. Her agent explained,
"The role is not one she should be asked to do." She was
replaced by Brenda Marshall.

Priscilla was next assigned
the lead in My Love Came Back, a romantic story involving a girl
violinist. Again, Priscilla refused the part, so a furious Jack
Warner suspended her. Olivia de Havilland, equally reluctant to act
in the film, eventually did.

Priscilla
dated assistant director and screenwriter Oren Haglund. Impulsively
she eloped with Haglund to Yuma, Arizona on January 14th, 1939, but
left him the following day. The marriage was soon annulled. In
November 1941, Priscilla became engaged to publisher John Barry, whom
she had first met in 1939. She wrote in the November issue of
Photoplay how she looked forward to their marriage. She also stated
she would continue her career. Abruptly, in early 1942, the
engagement to Barry was broken after she met Joseph Howard, a young
Air Force lieutenant, at a dude ranch in the Mojave Desert. A native
of Lawrence, Massachusetts, he had joined the Army Air Corps straight
from college in 1939. He was scouting the area for likely sites for
air bases and had taken a short vacation. The couple were married on
May 22nd, 1942, by a justice of the peace in Las Vegas at the home of
the executive officer of an Army Air Force gunnery school.

After winning her raise,
Priscilla returned to work, but the films assigned to her were no
better than those she had turned down. Brother Rat and a Baby was an
inferior sequel and Three Cheers For the Irish gave her little to do.
At Warner Bros. she appeared opposite Jeffrey Lynn and Ronald Reagan
in a light hearted comedy, Million Dollar Baby (above right) and as a
night club singer in Blues in the Night. Priscilla was paired with
Lynn in a number of comedys during this period and perhaps just to
keep the audience guessing or maybe just to mix it up a bit in
Million Dollar Baby she ended up with (spoilers) Reagan.

Blues
in the Night is a 1941 American musical drama film released by
Warner Brothers, directed by Anatole Litvak and starring Priscilla
Lane, Richard Whorf, Betty Field, Lloyd Nolan, Elia Kazan, and Jack
Carson. The film began when Elia Kazan optioned an unproduced play by
Edwin Gilbert (Hot Nocturne) and began retooling it for Broadway. He
eventually sold the rights to Warner Bros. who gave the script to
Robert Rossen to complete. After initially retitling it New Orleans
Blues, the studio named it after its principal musical number
"Blues in the Night", which later became a popular hit.
Kazan agreed to give up his screenwriting credit and appeared as a
clarinetist in the film. He later remarked that after acting in the
film he became convinced he could "direct better than Anatole
Litzvak". Kazan would give up acting and become "one of the
consummate filmmakers of the 20th century" after directing a
string of successful films, including, A Streetcar Named Desire
(1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and East of Eden (1955). During his
career, he won two Oscars as Best Director and received an Honorary
Oscar, won three Tony Awards, and four Golden Globes.

James Cagney and Dennis
Morgan were the studio's first two choices to play the gangster Del
Davis in Blues in the Night, but the role was eventually given to
Lloyd Nolan. John Garfield was cast in the role of pianist Jigger
Pine who was eventually played by Richard Whorf.

The plot follows jazz
pianist Jigger Pine (Whorf), while playing in a bar in St. Louis,
meets aspiring clarinetist Nickie Haroyen (Kazan) who tries to
convince him to put together a jazz band. After a drunk patron starts
a fight, Nickie and Jigger are thrown in jail with Jigger's drummer
and bassist. They hear a prisoner singing a blues song and are
inspired to set out for New Orleans where they hope to learn how to
perfect an authentic bluesy sound. There they meet fast-talking
trumpet player Leo and his wife Character (Lane) who is a talented
singer. Together, the quintet rides the rails, honing their technique
in dive bars across the country.

Blues
in the Night was met with a mixed critical reception upon its
release. Hollywood columnist Fred Othman named it "the worst
musical of the year". Donald Kirkley of The Baltimore Sun called
it "a bizarre screen oddity" while Los Angeles Times film
critic Philip K. Scheuer praised Richard Whorf's performance. It was
not financially successful as its East Coast release took place
shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The film has since
achieved a cult following, including The Simpsons creator Matt Groening.

The film's music is by
Harold Arlen with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, who were also nominated
for a Best Song Oscar for "Blues in the Night". Additional
music was written by Heinz Roemheld and Ray Heindorf (but only
Roemheld was credited). The film features the bands of Jimmie
Lunceford and Will Osborne. With the exception of Priscilla Lane none
of the actors were musicians so their playing had to be dubbed by
other artists. The trumpet music performed by Jack Carson's character
was dubbed by Snooky Young and Frankie Zinzer while the piano music
was dubbed by Stan Wrightsman. Saxophonist and clarinetist Archie
Rosate played Elia Kazan's clarinet solos.

In 1941 director Frank
Capra requested Priscilla for the lead opposite Cary Grant in Arsenic
and Old Lace. The hit comedy film was completed in early 1942, but
was not released until 1944. It was Priscillas last Warner
film. Her contract was terminated by mutual agreement after five
years with the studio.

Arsenic and Old Lace is a
dark comedy based on the Joseph Kesselring play. The script
adaptation was by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein. Capra
actually filmed the movie in 1941 because of star Cary Grant's
availability, but it was not released until 1944, after the original
stage version had finished its run on Broadway. Capra's family was
able to live off his salary from the film while he served in the war.

The lead role of Mortimer
Brewster was originally intended for Bob Hope, but he could not be
released from his contract with Paramount. Capra had also approached
Jack Benny and Ronald Reagan before learning that Grant would accept
the role. Boris Karloff played Jonathan Brewster, who "looks
like Karloff," on the Broadway stage, but he was unable to do
the movie as well because he was still appearing in the play during
filming, and Raymond Massey took his place. The film's supporting
cast also features Jack Carson, Edward Everett Horton and Peter Lorre.

Josephine
Hull and Jean Adair portray the Brewster sisters, Abby and Martha,
respectively. Hull and Adair, as well as John Alexander (who played
Teddy Roosevelt), were reprising their roles from the 1941 stage
production. Hull and Adair both received an eight-week leave of
absence from the stage production that was still running, but Karloff
did not as he was an investor in the stage production and its main
draw. The entire film was shot within those eight weeks and cost just
over $1.2 million of a $2 million budget to produce.

The comedy, which concerns
the sweet old Brewster sisters (Hull, Adair), beloved in their
genteel Brooklyn neighborhood for their many charitable acts. One
charity which the ladies don't advertise is their ongoing effort to
permit lonely bachelors to die with smiles on their faces, by serving
said bachelors elderberry wine spiked with arsenic. When the sisters'
nephew Mortimer (Grant) stumbles onto their secret, he is
understandably put out, especially since he has just married the
lovely Elaine Harper (Lane). Further complications ensue when the
murderous Jonathan Brewster (Massey) arrives home, on the lam from
the law with his snivelling accomplice Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre) and
looking for a place to hide out.

The contemporary critical
reviews were uniformly positive. The New York Times critic summed up
the majority view, "As a whole, Arsenic and Old Lace, the Warner
picture which came to the Strand yesterday, is good macabre fun."
This hilariously droll black comedy is one of the most successful
adaptations of theater to film. Frank Capra coaxes over-the-top
performances from a cast and is one of Capra's best. A comedy
classic, Arsenic and Old Lace has never lost its appeal, as new
generations of audiences keep discovering its lunatic charms. AFI's
voted Arsenic and Old Lace the #30 spot on it's "100 Years...
100 Laughs" list.

Priscilla freelanced next,
signing a one picture deal with Universal Studios where she starred
with Robert Cummings in Alfred Hitchcocks Saboteur (1942). The
director did not want either Cummings or Priscilla in the film. In
Priscillas case, Hitchcock felt she was too much the girl next
door. Universal insisted that they play the leads, and when the film
was released, Priscilla's acting was praised.

In
the film Aircraft factory worker Barry Kane (Cummings) is accused of
starting a fire at a Glendale, California airplane plant during World
War II, an act of sabotage that killed his friend Mason. Kane is the
fall guy for a clever ring of Nazi spies, headed by above-suspicion
American philanthropist Charles Tobin (played by Otto Kruger). Kane
believes the real culprit is a man named Fry who handed him a fire
extinguisher filled with gasoline during the fire. When the
investigators find no one named "Fry" on the list of plant
workers, they assume Kane is guilty. Now Kane is on a cross-country
chase after the genuine saboteur, all the while pursued himself by
the police. Along the way, he acquires a reluctant "travelling
companion" in the form of Priscilla Lane, who at first despises
Kane and intends to turn him over to the authorities at her first
opportunity, but who gradually comes to realize that the guy is
innocent. Alfred Hitchcock intended Saboteur to be the American
equivalent to his British The 39 Steps, employing such details as the
solid-citizen villain, the handcuffed hero, the unwilling blonde
heroine, and any number of stopovers with a variety of offbeat characters.

Hitchcock
was under contract to David O. Selznick, so he first pitched the
idea for the film to him; Selznick gave the okay for a script to be
written, assigning John Houseman to keep an eye on its progress and
direction. Val Lewton, Selznick's story editor, eventually passed on
the script, so Selznick forced Hitchcock to offer it to other
studios, "causing ill feelings between the producer and his
director since it not only showed a lack of belief in Hitchcock's
abilities, but also because the terms of Hitchcock's contract would
net Selznick a three-hundred percent profit on the sale."
Universal signed on, but their budgetary limits meant Hitchcock
couldn't afford Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, the two actors he
wanted for the leading roles; Universal brought in Dorothy Parker to
write a few scenes, "mostly the patriotic speeches given by the
hero." Production on the film began less than two weeks after
the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Hitchcock used extensive
location footage in the film, especially in New York City, and
utilized special long lenses to shoot from great distances. At one
point Norman Lloyd glances at a capsized ship in the harbor and
smiles knowingly. The ship shown is the former SS Normandie (renamed
the USS Alaska in the film) which was rumored to have been sabotaged
by the Germans. Regarding this scene, Hitchcock said: "the Navy
raised hell with Universal about these shots because I implied that
the Normandie had been sabotaged, which was a reflection on their
lack of vigilance in guarding it."

There was clever matching
of the location footage with studio shots, many using matte paintings
for background, for example in shots of the western ghost town,
"Soda City". The famed Statue of Liberty sequence takes
place on the torch platform, which had actually been closed to public
access after the Black Tom sabotage of July 30th, 1916. A mock-up
built for filming gave an accurate depiction of this part of the statue.

Hitchcock
makes his trademark cameo appearance about an hour into the film,
standing at a kiosk in front of Cut Rate Drugs in New York as the
saboteur's car pulls up. In his book-length interview with
François Truffaut (Simon and Schuster, 1967), Hitchcock says
he and Parker filmed a cameo showing them as the elderly couple who
see Cummings and Lane hitchhiking and drive away, but that he decided
to change that shot to the existing cameo.

There was no music to
underscore the film's climactic movie theatre scene; Hitchcock chose
to let the action on the screen propel the scene on its own. The
scene also utilized visual effects that were ahead of their time. In
particular, Lloyd lay on his side on a black saddle on a black floor
while the camera was hauled from closeup to 40-feet above him. Film
taken from the top of the Statue was then superimposed onto the black
background, making him appear to drop downward, away from the camera.

The
film did very well at the box office. Bosley Crowther of The New
York Times called the film a "swift, high-tension film which
throws itself forward so rapidly that it permits slight opportunity
for looking back. And it hurtles the holes and bumps which plague it
with a speed that forcefully tries to cover them up." Crowther
noted that "so abundant [are] the breathless events that one
might forget, in the hubbub, that there is no logic in this
wild-goose chase". Time magazine called it "one hour and 45
minutes of almost simon-pure melodrama from the hand of the
master"; the film's "artful touches serve another purpose
which is only incidental to Saboteur's melodramatic intent. They warn
Americans, as Hollywood has so far failed to do, that fifth
columnists can be outwardly clean and patriotic citizens, just like
themselves." So vile were these Nazi spies that at one point in
the film they are holding Priscilla Lane captive and they make her
pay for her own lunch while being held hostage.

Saboteur could be
considered a minor Hitchcock classic and would be of interest to fans
because he uses elements that he would repeat in his more well known
films such as North by Northwest. Including the wrongly accused man
on the run, the chase across country and the films climax at a famous landmark.

Over the years many of
parodied Hitchcock's film making style. The Wrong Guy, a 1997
Canadian comedy film directed by David Steinberg tips it's hat to
Hitch with it's hero on the lam plot, which includes in a Saboteur
like climax on "a statue of liberty". It was co-written by
Dave Foley of The Kids in the Hall and Newsradio fame, along with
David Anthony Higgins and Jay Kogen (The Simpsons).

Priscilla had commitments
for two more films. The first was Silver Queens for producer Harry
Sherman in which she was co-starred with George Brent. She played the
owner of a gambling house in 1870s San Francisco. The other film was
a Jack Benny comedy, The Meanest Man in the World (above), released
in January 1943.

Priscilla
then retired from films. For the duration of the war, she followed
her husband across the country as he moved from one military base to
another. She was generous with her talents and often performed at
camp shows. At the wars end in 1945, Priscilla and Joe were
living in New Mexico and she was pregnant with their first of four children.

Priscilla accepted the
leading role in Fun on a Weekend (left) co-starring Eddie Bracken
which was released in 1947. In 1948 Priscilla accepted the offer of
the lead role opposite Lawrence Tierney in a film noir, Bodyguard,
starring as Doris Brewster. (Trivia alert: Priscilla also played a
Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace). Bodyguard proved to be her last
picture and is notable not only because it was her last screen
performance, but also because it was the second film written by
Robert Altman.

An expected contract with
RKO Studios did not eventuate. With the advent of television, and the
Supreme Courts anti-trust ruling against the studios, the whole
studio system was collapsing, and there was a drastic cut back in the
number of players under contract. Priscilla chose this time to retire
a devote her time to her family. Priscilla returned to show business
briefly in 1958 with her own show on a local television station
broadcasting from Boston. Titled The Priscilla Lane Show, she chatted
and interviewed celebrities visiting the area. She enjoyed the
television experience, but family demands proved too much, and she
gave it up after a year.

In 1994, Priscilla was
diagnosed with lung cancer and died on April 4, 1995, only two months
before her eightieth birthday. She was burried at Arlington National
Cemetery in Virginia. Her husband Joe, who had served in the Air
Force reserve for nearly forty years had been buried there with full
military honors when he died suddenly in 1976. Priscilla was laid to
rest beside him.